These cookies are my humble attempt to replicate the ones that used to be (and still are, for all I know) sold at the coffee shop in my college library. Here’s today’s iteration, perfected over the past four years: I’ve tweaked the recipe a bit since 2014, so I thought I’d post an update for… Read More Pumpkin-Walnut-Chocolate-Chip Cookies 2.0
Since I’m moving this month and need to limit both my spending and my accumulation of new crap, I’ve put myself on a replacement-only beauty no-buy until the end of August. It’s been pretty easy so far: I’ve been so consumed with other problems that I haven’t had much brain space for makeup. But since… Read More My Best No-Buy Tips
Despite the flood of new eyeshadow palettes in the past few years, I own just a few: Modern Renaissance, Naked2 Basics, a nine-pan custom theBalm palette, and a magnetic palette containing, among other things, slightly less than half (five shades) of a depotted theBalm Nude ‘Tude. The newest palette in my collection is Modern Renaissance,… Read More Anti-Haul: Mauve/Plum/Purple Eyeshadow Palettes
I am not a serial depotter of beauty products. I admire people with a more utilitarian approach to makeup, people for whom packaging means little to nothing. But I’m not one of those people, and I probably never will be. I don’t insist on the fanciest, most elaborate compacts and tubes: MAC lipsticks are some… Read More Topshop Otherworldly Part 2: EXTREME MELTDOWN
Earlier today, while scrolling through Facebook and minding my own business (well, other people’s business, if we’re getting technical), I came upon this Ulta ad: Okay. Okay. LET’S UNPACK THIS, as we say in the lit-crit biz. In one sense, this is your typical “#yolo buy all the things” message. I received a similar message… Read More Your Daily Memento Mori, Courtesy of Ulta
Yesterday I came across a very insightful post on r/MakeupRehab, titled “A thought on the fakeness of Instagram…” It’s a long post, so I won’t quote it in full, but the writer argues that successful Instagrammers like her sister, women whose posts feature them “in trendy places in even trendier outfits,” perpetuate an internalized misogyny… Read More On the “Fakeness” of Social Media
…instead of, you know, her opponent’s total disdain for the democratic process. The third (and, blessedly, last) presidential debate of 2016 took place last night at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. I’m not going to discuss the content of the debate because 1) it’s pretty obvious which candidate I support and 2) this is a… Read More Let’s Talk About Hillary’s Lipstick
“Look, you stupid bastard, you’ve got no arms left!” If you frequent the company of middle-aged male professors who specialize in Renaissance history or literature, chances are good you’ll hear a lot of Monty Python references. A few years ago, after too much time spent laughing politely at allusions that went over my head, I… Read More Unholy Grails
Welcome to another installment of my not-actually-monthly compilation of monthly favorites! Some bloggers use favorites posts to spotlight new purchases, but I prefer to feature older favorites as well as non-makeup discoveries. Let’s begin with my main makeup fixation in June: 1. Purple Lipstick Purple has been my favorite lip color since I started wearing… Read More June Favorites (Beauty and Otherwise)
Now that exactly half of 2015 is behind us, I thought it might be interesting to revisit the beauty resolutions I made at the end of last year and see how many I managed to keep in the last six months. I can’t actually remember all of them off the top of my head, which… Read More So, How About Those New Year’s Resolutions?
Auxiliary Beauty 